wash it in baby blue

Us today, walking to the bus stop, bickering. We act like an old married couple. We can find each other’s buttons in the dark. One hand tied behind our backs. I don’t hear him. He doesn’t hear me. I said something about painting and he thought I meant walls but I meant pictures and I didn’t say one word. Instead, I threw my imaginary hands up in the imaginary air and sighed one of those sassy imaginary sighs. In real life though, all I did was realize that we weren’t listening to each other anymore and oh, he’s said about 4 dozen things and I didn’t catch a single one. There you have it.

The bus came and went with him. I walked home, getting lost in the herd that is a downtown Seattle sidewalk at 6pm. I tried not to think about it and instead planned out my next paintings. Pictures. Not walls. As I weaved through the slower moving people traffic and crossed the imaginary line into my neighborhood. He was like barely there brushstrokes. Under the surface. Messing everything up.

He is my unlikely muse in tennis shoes and a track jacket. The pictures I snap of him are my favorites. The stories I toss up, my most read. My artwork bears witness. Secret messages hidden in little corners that he’ll never find. And I don’t tell. When we talk, we are all ideas. Sometimes saying the same exact thing at the same exact time and other times adding on to barely there notions until they are whole novels with hard covers and dog eared pages.

For all this sameness we are not the same. Easily I am the more sensitive. Sweet. Wavering of the two. He is stone sometimes. He is compartmentalized. Easily, the funnier of the pair. Attached by rubber bands. Or crazy glue. Or nothing real at all. We go from being best friends to not speaking in 15 seconds and then right back again. But it’s just me who brings him orange juice when he’s cranky from the rain. It’s just me. There you have it.

It’s Monday night and in three days I’ll be in the art space, hiding my nerves in a glass of red wine with my art up and lit and people squinting at my pen lines and whispering to their friends. I squandered tonight. I should have painted. Pictures. Not walls. One more piece for Thursday. One more block of color breaking up the white. But after a weekend of acrylic, my creative peanut is fast asleep.

Listen closely. You can hear the zzzzzzz’s.